That got Gabriella’s dander up a bit. Which, I must admit, I liked. “Not that kind of feeling,” she said. “It was just-I don’t know-like she was somebody other than who she said she was.”
I laughed and, unfortunately, sprayed the table with cookie crumbs. “So you don’t think she was really Romanian royalty?”
“I didn’t believe that or anything else she said.”
I liked that, too. “Your shit detector start beeping, did it?”
For the first time that morning she smiled. “Yes, it did. And it just wasn’t the things she said. It was her-what’s a good word for it?”
I’m an old woman. I gave her an old word. “Her countenance?”
“Yeah-her countenance.”
I had no reason to doubt the reliability of Gabriella’s shit detector. It had certainly worked that day I went to see her at the student newspaper office. She’s seen right through my cock-and-bull story about wanting to rummage through the paper’s old files to see what I could find about my own years at Hemphill College. She knew I was digging into Gordon Sweet’s murder. “So why the tears when you heard that Violeta Bell had been murdered? If you had such a bad feeling about her?”
She corrected me. “I didn’t say I had a bad feeling about her. She was a lot of fun. Just like the other three. But I had the sense she was hiding something. Or hiding from something.”
I took a more modest bite of cookie and studied her countenance. Inside that snip of a girl lived a wise woman. “Why would she do the interview then?” I asked. “The pages of a newspaper aren’t exactly the best place to hide. Although nobody reads newspapers any more.”
Gabriella pulled her tea bag from her mug. Let it swing back and forth like a body dangling from a noose. “I think maybe she just wanted to be loved.”
“Just wanted to be loved? For Pete’s sake!”
“I know that sounds like a lot of mushy psychobabble, Mrs. Sprowls. But I think maybe that was it. On the outside she was confident and classy. Inside, totally a mess.”
I couldn’t stop myself. “Just the opposite of me, you’re saying?”
She looked at me the way Aubrey McGinty used to look at me. With exasperation. “I’m saying that maybe she was one of those excruciatingly insecure people who need to be the center of attention no matter what.”
“And so she did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t?”
“Yeah.”
“And you did the interview knowing she probably shouldn’t, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Because it was your first story and you didn’t want to blow it?”
“Yeah.”
“And so when you heard she’d been murdered-”
“Yeah.”
4
Thursday, July 13
I retrieved my morning paper from the azalea bushes. Which was nothing to grumble about. Too many mornings it’s on the roof. On my way back to the kitchen I read the headlines. The news couldn’t have been better:
Suspect Arrested In
‘Never Dull’ Murder
By Dale Marabout
Hannawa-Union Staff Writer
HANNAWA-Police Wednesday arrested a “person of interest” in their investigation into the murder of retired antique dealer Violeta Bell.
Bell, 72, was found dead July 5 in the fitness room of the Carmichael House condominiums where she lived. She had been shot three times at close range, police said.
The murder weapon, believed to be a. 22 pistol, has not been found, police confirmed.
There was no Ike waiting for me at the breakfast table this morning-which was either a good thing or a bad thing depending which side of the independence versus companionship argument you come down on. I ate my oatmeal and read:
Police identified the man they took into custody as cabdriver Edward “Eddie” French.
He was arrested just before dawn at his second-story apartment in the Meriwether Square district on the city’s near west side, police said.
Both French and Bell were featured in a Herald-Union story earlier this month.
That story explored the active social lives of Bell and three other women living at the Carmichael House. Calling themselves “The Queens of Never Dull,” the women hired French to drive them to garage sales on Saturdays.
Police said that while they lacked evidence to charge French with Bell’s murder, the 56-year-old Hannawa native had a number of items in his possession that they believed belonged to the slain woman.
One source close to the case described those items as “very pricey antiques.”
Court records show that French has had a number of run-ins with local police departments over the years, including convictions for burglary in 1981 and 1987.
“Good for you, Mr. Marabout,” I whispered as I turned to the jump page. By that, of course, I meant good for me. Apparently the police had their man. That meant I’d no longer be responsible for Gabriella Nash’s guilty conscience. Every morning for more than a week now she’d been checking in with me as if I were her parole officer.
I finished my oatmeal, took James for his walk, showered and trimmed my bangs-yes, I’m still wearing my hair in this silly 1950s Prince Valiant style-and searched my closet for something I hadn’t worn to work in a while. Something that would express how good I felt. The best I could do was my lime green Liz Claiborne lawn shirt with yellow pinstripes and a pair of twill chinos from Lands’ End in some sensible shade of white they call Nantucket Clay.
I got to the morgue right at nine. I made my tea, read the obituaries, zapped all the worthless emails in my inbox, and settled in to mark up that morning’s paper.
And of course my phone rang. And of course it was Suzie. “Hiya, Maddy. It’s Suzie. I’ve got Mr. Averill on the phone for you.”
“Good gravy! What does he-”
“Morning, Maddy!”
“Bob! How are you?”
“Fine and dandy-so how long has it been since you and I had lunch?”
Bob Averill is The Herald-Union’s editor-in-chief. An overstuffed teddy bear about to turn sixty. Unless you count spearing cheese squares at the newsroom Christmas party, he and I had never had lunch together. “It has been a while,” I said.
“We should rectify that.”
“I suppose we should.”
“How about today?”
“Well-”
“Super. I’ll have Suzie make reservations for us at Speckley’s. Say twelve-thirty?”
I was too shocked to tell him that you don’t need reservations at Speckley’s. That as long as you comply with the NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE sign on the door, they’ll seat you. I told him twelve-thirty would be great. That I would meet him there.
“Meet me? Maddy Sprowls! What kind of men have you been eating with? I’ll drive.”
And so in three hours I was going to have lunch with Bob Averill. And it was no mystery why. He finally had the ammunition he needed to force me into retirement. Or as he once put it: “The common ground you and I need to find vis-a-vis your tenure at the paper.”
I was not going without a fight. I grabbed a piece of scrap paper and drew a line down the middle. On the left I listed the various infractions he might bring up: my long lunches, personal long distance calls, my usually foul disposition. On the right I listed explanations or denials. When I got to my snoopfests into the Buddy Wing and Gordon Sweet murders, I noted that while they had been unauthorized, on the sly, and initially troublesome for the paper, they both had resulted in some very good journalism.
Then, while I was pondering how I could good-naturedly threaten filing an age discrimination suit, Gabriella Nash appeared in front of my desk. She announced that she was “totally apoplectic.”
“About what, dear?”
Like a bad actress in a bad movie, she flung that morning’s front page on my desk. “That is my story, Mrs. Sprowls.”
I knew what she meant of course. But with my hours at The Herald-Union down to a precious few, I was in no mood for foolishness. Especially hers. I pretended to study the story she was thumping with her finger. “According to the byline, it’s Dale Marabout’s story.”